The second victim was Francesca Soavi. Leonarda had promised her a job at the girls’ school in Piacenza. On the morning of 5 September 1940, she went to say goodbye to her friend before setting off. The script was the same: Leonarda convinced the woman to write two postcards, telling her she should send them from Correggio to inform her acquaintances that she was leaving, but without saying where she was going. Leonarda then attacked the woman and made the second “sacrifice”. The third and final victim was Virginia Cacioppo, a former opera singer, then 53, reduced to living with her memories of the past, in poverty. Leonarda offered her a job in Florence as the secretary to a mysterious theatre impresario, begging her not to tell a soul. Virginia was enthusiastic about the proposal, and kept the secret. On 30 September 1940 she went to Leonarda’s house, where: “She ended up in the pot, like the other two (…); her flesh was fat and white, when it had melted I added a bottle of col
Born in Montella di Avellino in 1893 and marked by an unhappy childhood, in 1914 Leonarda Cianciulli married Raffaele Pansardi, a clerk in the registry office, and went to live in Lariano in Alta Irpinia. In 1930 an earthquake destroyed their home, and the couple moved to Correggio, in the province of Reggio Emilia. Leonarda had seventeen pregnancies: three were miscarriages, while ten of the children died at a tender age. The four surviving children were to be protected at any price, for Leonarda had not forgotten the words of a gypsy fortune-teller who many years earlier had predicted a terrible fate for her: “You will marry and have children, but all your children will die.” Later she had had her palm read by another gypsy, who told her: “In your right hand I see prison, in your left a criminal asylum.” In 1939, when she heard that her eldest and favourite son Giuseppe was to join the army, as Italy’s entry into the war became increasingly imminent, Leonarda decided what she had